


enduring

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (apparently that's a tag and I assume it's about his depression and stuff?), Castiel Can Hear Longing, Castiel Has Issues, M/M, Post-Episode: s13e07 War of the Worlds, don't read this if reading Cas's miserable inner monologue would bum you out, hey just in case it doesn't mean what it sounds like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 07:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12836664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: 13x07 coda: Cas waits in the dark.





	enduring

Demons didn’t sleep, but the nights were quiet in Asmodeus’s third-hand lair in the abandoned asylum. Castiel supposed they preferred the cover of darkness for whatever nefarious things they were up to. Many evil spells worked best at certain times of the night, for example. And it seemed the last remaining Prince of Hell had taken the Needham Asylum mostly as a trophy, because Crowley and then Lucifer had cared about establishing their petty thrones there.

                Cas closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. He was still standing. He didn’t _need_ to sit down and it felt somehow like admitting defeat. And so he had remained standing, waiting, still as he could be.

He hoped that tonight would be another where they were left alone and Lucifer, in the next cell over, would be quiet and morose, rather than yelling agitatedly about Michael at so much as a rat making a disturbance from down the hall. Or _rattling_ things. He, of course, had been put in the cell with things to rattle, while Cas barely had a loose pebble on the ground.

                Despite all the noise, Lucifer was making very little headway in convincing Asmodeus to stop posing and start listening to the warnings about this other Michael that he had discovered.

                In the stillness of their first night left alone here, when all the demons had gone to bed and left their two captive, broken angels to each other’s company, Cas had asked about Mary. Lucifer had been surprisingly eager to talk, even managing to be barely more annoying than whatever baseline measurement of annoyance he always gave off, like radiation with no end to its half-life. Cooperative Lucifer was unsettling on the deepest level.

                Cas had been most surprised by Lucifer admitting that Mary was probably fine, not because that she was still alive – some part of him refused to believe a Winchester was dead unless there was no argument to be had and a body in front of him because their tenacity resonated on a truly cosmic scale – but because Lucifer actually sounded impressed, and was genuinely rating her survival chances on her strengths and not who would toy with her longest. And he had admitted – knowing they were totally alone for the long night – that she had landed several good hits on him when they fought.

                But this silence was a commodity that only one of them valued, because Cas was trapped as the only person who couldn’t shut it out or just _leave_ in the vicinity of a defeated Lucifer whose only weapon left was _incessant_ talking. It made Cas miss Crowley. At least there was a difference between someone who couldn’t shut up because they loved the sound of their own voice, and one who was doing it to be cruel.

                He remembered how he had hurt Sam and broken the wall in his head and so how visions of Lucifer had kept him awake at the cost of his sanity and nearly his life and how Cas had stepped in to take that burden from him to repent for all he had done. Perhaps he would never really be done with that repentance, though Sam seemed to have wholeheartedly forgiven Cas years ago.

It followed him, just as all the other terrible things he’d done did. Like how he had lost Jack because of the guilt of innocent blood on his hands, and Cas hadn’t been able to pull him back from that brink, because how _did_ you continue day after day except pushing it aside and reassuring yourself in the grand scheme it all might mean something.

                Cas closed his eyes, and welcomed the darkness, the sense of closing out everything around him so that for a moment in this rare silence, he could pretend it had all fallen away and he was back in the void.

He remembered threatening the Empty that he would refuse to sleep, would stay awake until they were both insane.

                It struck him as extremely ironic that he was now wishing that he _could_ sleep to tune Lucifer out.

                In this moment of silence he had been gifted, this moment of darkness he had made for himself, he couldn’t stop himself returning to the Empty.

                He heard its voice again, irritating him with his own vocal chords, voicing his own fears, his own hates, to him. He had been so proud of being the one to annoy it to the point of freeing him, to pose his own existence as an irritant so awful that it could shake him back to life. On a good day, that felt like a victory.

                On a bad day, Cas began to wonder if all he’d seen in there was a true, awful reflection of himself, and he hadn’t stood up for himself at all, only confirmed that all he could do was exist, and that in itself was an annoyance that no one could stand.

                That no one would ever truly want him, but tolerate him only as long as they could bear before ejecting him from their lives.

                The fears that the Empty so helpfully pointed out to him drifted in and out of his head before and after, whether he was being mocked by some uninteresting adversary or if he was out on the road alone for weeks at a time. Or sitting in a half-lit room with an empty bowl of popcorn on one side and Dean unexpectedly asleep on his shoulder on the other side, the laptop balanced on Cas’s knees showing the end credits of whatever movie Dean had insisted they needed to watch now.

                Those thoughts hurt especially hard at that time. The human need to sleep was not like the oblivion the Empty wanted to plunge Cas back into, but a time of rest and healing, the mind filling the time with dreams of all those fears and desires mixed together in incomprehensible nightmares or pleasurable visions. If Dean rolled his head onto Cas’s shoulder and reached for him in his sleep, grabbed a handful of Cas’s coat and clung tightly, what was he dreaming about? Who was he imagining grasping and could it ever be Cas?

                He felt pretty certain that if he’d ever thought he had some shade of a chance with Dean, that he hadn’t imagined the potential they had perhaps once had, it must have faded by now.

                But then he also felt the stab of anxiety that Dean felt when the call ended between him and Asmodeus, when he had stolen Cas’s voice on the phone. The sense of worry building back up in those signals from Dean that had prodded at the back of Cas’s head time and time again over the last decade.

                He _knew_ Dean cared about him, though. That wasn’t where his paralysing fear lay. It lay in reaching out and taking the hand Dean grasped at him with in his sleep, and letting him wake up gently knowing Cas was there and – and that he would be there.

                Or he _would_ be, had he not gotten himself abducted by the most tediously one-note demon Cas had ever met in his long existence. Even Lucifer had disowned him and it made Cas worry what it meant when he was secretly on Lucifer’s side, agreeing with his decisions.

                A fresh wave of Dean’s worry, his ache to talk to Cas again, to check that he’s okay, clawed at Cas’s stomach. It never used to feel that way. It had become more and more like an assault on Cas’s emotions, than a neutral tug to get his attention. It had been worse and worse every time he went missing or had avoided talking to Dean recently. He doesn’t know if he could survive this again. For the first time he wondered how bad it had been while he was dead, remembered how as soon as he hung up on Dean from the payphone, how he had felt Dean rushing towards him, that feeling of needing Cas flying ahead of Dean on the road.

                A wild thought drifted into Cas’s head. That Cas might not be able to fly to Dean, and Jack may not want to be found, but could _he_ do the finding?

Cas had no idea if angels could pray, but then he had no idea if Jack would be able to hear an angel’s prayer even if it didn’t normally work.

                Cas had rarely attempted this process from the other end, and usually to no or terrible result. But he bowed his head, and hopelessly thought in Jack’s direction. _I hope you’re okay. I’m failing you again. I can’t even start to find you and my attempts to help you have only led to my capture. If you can hear me…_ He ran into a brick wall of what he wanted. He didn’t want Jack to come here. Jack had told him how Asmodeus had manipulated him before. Even though he hopefully would have learned to be careful – and Jack was a fast learner, that Cas could see for himself – he didn’t want him to come near someone who had scared him that badly. _Go back home, to Sam and Dean. Please, Jack_.

That ought to do it, he thought. If Jack hadn’t already somehow picked up on Cas’s earlier desire to find him, then perhaps a direct plea would work. Perhaps Jack would know where Cas was just as Cas couldn’t _stop_ himself feeling Dean pacing the Bunker’s halls.

                Against hope and his own orders, Cas found himself waiting for several long, silent minutes to see if Jack would suddenly appear, and break him free. The sense of failure to help Jack nagged at him. The fear that something had happened and he hadn’t been there. Again. He resented himself for even thinking he had to reach out to Jack and be the one asking for help, even if it didn’t work. Which it probably hadn’t.

                Frustrated, Cas began to pace his cell again, like a caged creature, anything rather than sit down and accept it.

                From the other side of the wall, that insufferable voice started up again. “You’re not going to get us free trying to walk a hole in the floor.”

                Cas rolled his eyes, and waited.


End file.
